GlobalFoundries, a contract chip manufacturer that works closely with semiconductor companies, appointed former Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha as its chief executive Monday.

Jha replaces Ajit Manocha, who will return to a shareholder advisor role he held before being appointed as CEO in mid-2011, according to a news release.

GlobalFoundries, which has 13,000 employees, was founded in 2009 as a partnership between Advanced Micro Devices and the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC). Its development partners include IBM, Renesas, STMicroelectronics, Samsung and Toshiba. AMD shed its stake in the company in 2012 to focus on design, and GlobalFoundries is now fully owned by ATIC, which is a part of the Abu Dhabi government's Mubadala Development investment arm.

Based in Silicon Valley, GlobalFoundries has manufacturing facilities in Dresden, Germany; Malta, New York; and Singapore. Jha's duties will include fitting the Malta facility to accommodate 14 nanometer technology as chipmakers push to make chips with ever smaller transistors. The company also has plans to upgrade its facilities in Singapore and Germany, it said.

Smaller transistors mean faster and more power-efficient chips, but the industry is expecting challenges in engineering chips to meet Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors that can be placed on silicon doubles every two years.

This year GlobalFoundries expects to produce 2.3 million 300mm wafers, with transistors ranging in size from 130nm to 28nm, according to its website.